If you are purchasing potting soil, you may be wondering how many dry quarts are in a cubic foot (dry quarts are a measurement of dry volume). Knowing how to convert between these two units can help you if you are buying soil for specific containers that use quarts, but the soil that you are purchasing is measured in cubic feet.
Fortunately, learning how many quarts are in a cubic foot is straightforward, and you should be able to calculate it easily.
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How Many Quarts Are in a Cubic Foot of Soil?
Most soil is sold by the cubic foot or cubic yard. If you are buying bags of potting soil, it typically comes in a bag of 1 cubic foot. You will likely need to know how to switch between these units of measure if you are planning to purchase potting soil. This is particularly important if you are buying bags of other sizes or ordering a truckload of soil.
There are 25.71 dry quarts per 1 cubic foot. To convert from cubic feet to cubic yards, you would need to know that there are 3 feet in a yard. Thus, a cubic yard is equal to 27 cubic feet.
Next, you would need to multiply 27 cubic feet by the 25.71 dry quarts per 1 cubic foot to determine how many quarts are in a cubic yard. This calculation yields 694.17 dry quarts.
Measuring Based on a Container
If you have a container of a specific size, you might wish to purchase potting soil for it. Check the bottom of the pot to determine how many dry quarts the container holds. For some planters, this amount will be noted. Once you know the number of quarts the container can hold, you can determine how much potting soil to purchase.
Perhaps your container will hold 51.5 quarts. You know there are 25.71 dry quarts per 1 cubic foot, so you can divide the 51.5 quarts of your container by 25.71 to learn that you'd need 2 cubic feet of potting soil for your container.
If you needed to convert that measurement to cubic yards, you could divide your 2 cubic feet of potting soil by 27 to determine how many cubic yards you'd need. You would only need about 0.07 cubic yards of potting soil based on this.
Planning Potting Soil Purchases
There are other ways to determine how much potting soil to buy. You may not know how many quarts are in your containers, but you can hold planters up to bags of soil at the store and visually guess how many bags of soil you would need.
Most planters have holes in the bottom, so it would not work to pour water into them to determine how many quarts they can hold. Furthermore, water would be a liquid measure, and these conversions are for dry measurements.
If you are planning to use potting soil in a much larger area, like a raised garden bed, you can contact your local garden supply center or wherever you'd like to lay the soil to ask for advice. You may be able to find online calculators that you can use to help determine the soil requirements of your project. You'll need to know the shape of the area you'd like to fill as well as the measurements of the area.